Kids and computers

"Science is a tool for problem-solving - the best that humans possess. But it has this peculiarity, that when it is most successful it creates new problems, some of which are insoluble." (John Gray)

V's niece has a surprising fluency about the PC interface. Yet the notion that each generation is inevitably more au fait with information technology is a myth that could do with some challenging.

For example, V herself would have little trouble using the DOS prompt to deal with a tricky corrupted file that repeatedly crashes Windows Explorer once clicked on. Her niece meanwhile, for all her dextrous expertise, probably has little comparable understanding of the underlying hardware and software architecture of a laptop. For her, it's really just an oversize Blackberry that won't fit in her back pocket.*

I'm sure she knows how to use the simple Google search box to look up Justin Bieber, but if she didn't, I could show her in a matter of minutes. What I'd find a lot harder to pass on are the sort of sophisticated search techniques that became the basis of my living in the mid-1990s. This is because they are grounded in reasoning skills acquired across my formal education, many of which have little basis in either computers or technology in general (Medieval History for example!)

Here's another example that got us thinking. We have a young acquaintance in our colonia of apparently above-average intelligence and sensitivity, better-educated and certainly comfortable with computers. When V offered to help him improve his English conversation skills, we soon discovered that he didn't really know how to use a dictionary. Now you might think that this, rather like mental arithmetic, is exactly the sort of low-tech talent that kids today can dispense with, because there are electronic tools out there that make such tasks so much easier than they were in our day.

But dictionaries are systematised information, the very basis of the computational revolution that went mainstream in the latter part of the last century. And it's not just that our friend struggled, as so many Chapines do, with his ortografia: not knowing or caring for example if the translation of 'deep' is Hondo or Ondo. He didn't seem to have accurate mental map of how the letters of the alphabet are ordered, and once he got to the right letter for the word he was seeking, he started slowly reading every word in the sequence until he eventually found it.

It therefore surely goes without saying that the ability to mentally parse an index at speed without a computer is very much a preliminary life skill that one has to acquire before one has any hope of getting the most out of all that binary data stored on computers around the globe.

Most of the really important computer skills are not really computer skills at all. Hence, giving every teen in Guatemala a free laptop is unlikely to transform the nation into an IT powerhouse overnight...though it might drastically increase the number of irrelevant Facebook taggings.

The people who get the most out of these technologies are ultimately those who are using them as an extension — an enhancement even — of their own information processing capabilities. Yet the flipside of this 'solution' is perhaps a whole new set of problems, when one considers that the very same tools may actually be hindering a whole subset of children in education today from acquiring these capabilities in the first place.

*I'm reminded of my photographer cousin's gripes that somewhere between XP and 7, the dominant visual metaphor for Windows became that of a kiddies' playground.

The Interweb for beginners

Amusingly mashed-up gobbets from the Beeb's digitalrevolution site.

Prometheus - The Media Revolution (2)

Googlezon sounds a bit sinister...

Prometheus - The Media Revolution (1)

"Experience is the new reality..."

The what-osaurus? I'd like to see him try "Worcestershire Sauce". I think the Fill'eep K. Deek accent really adds to this piece though.

Digital Marketing explained...

Potent combinations of everyone and someone

Very insightful new post on Technium by Kevin Kelly:

"Never before have we been able to make systems with as much "hive" in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness.

In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers

...ad infinitum.

"The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of "everybody" (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures."

In the wrong business

Just a day before EMI announced that they will have to shed up to 2000 jobs, the FT reported that the same firm spends up to $50m each year disposing of unsold CDs.

Bubble, what bubble?

The Beeb's Digital Planet team met some optimistic seed-funders from Silicon Valley in Oxford last week. One such, Paul Graham, came out with some choice remarks which made me laugh out loud:

"The venture capital funds are swollen right now; it's not a problem of lack of money it's a problem of lack of ideas."

And on Bubble 2.0:

"We haven't seen any sign of it yet, in fact if anything, it's getting easier and easier for start-ups to raise money."

Well, Duh!

A well-deserved rebuke for the BBC

"A tabloid approach to an issue of public safety."

I blogged about it here back in May.

LiveLeak

The BBC's Newsnight programme has given some overdue mainstream attention to the role of LiveLeak in the way that people, especially young people, are informing themselves about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The results range from the banal to the chilling via the utterly childish," Liz McKean reports. She missed out moving.

Yes, there's plenty of "I'm going to blow up your mosque"- type material, but there is also a good deal of the kind of 'reality' that ironically we usually only consume through the medium of fiction.

Interesting that the Beeb don't mention the home-movies of our own armed forces on LiveLeak. And what of the Canadians? My cousin Philip couldn't quite believe this clip of the Canucks raiding a Taleban compound "in the Stan". At one stage they are so gung-ho they can't even be bothered to lay down covering fire.

When YOU is a soldier on a real battlefield, the results of Web 2.0 are far from trivial. If Andrew Keen had wanted to write a serious book about what happens when traditional editorial controls break down, this British-based site ought to have been his starting point.

Newsnight asks what drives soldiers to post such "compromising" material on the Web. The answer surely is that they want their already compromised everyday world to be on record, and for the rest of us to see how different it is from the way these conflicts are being represented to us by politicians and the media. And to both celebrate and validate their shared experience.

The Cult of the Amateur (2)

"Let's not go down in history as that infamous generation who, intoxicated by the ideal of democratisation, killed professional mainstream media. Let's not be remembered for replacing movies, music, and books with YOU!" (Andrew Keen)

This is one of those books like The Celestine Prophecy that saves its loopiest logic for the last few chapters, starting with chapter 6, 'Moral Disorder'.

It's the old be very scared critique of Internet technologies:

"From hypersexed teenagers, to identity thieves, to compulsive gamblers and addicts of all stripes, the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0. It seduces us into acting on our most deviant instincts and allows us to succumb to our most destructive vices. And it is corroding and corrupting the values we share as a nation."

Amen. Keen obviously finished the final draft too soon to include radiation poisoning from wireless routers.

He quotes Baroness Susan Greenfield as stating that children of the Web 2.0 generation "will be more prone to real-world violence, less able to compromise or negotiate, apt to be poor learners and lacking in empathy."

The authors of The Rebel Sell compare the views of Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud on the problems of human social organisation. Freud apparently believed that all efforts at civilisation would end up being undermined by our baser instincts. Hobbes however, thought the problem was a question of trust relationships. If the right ones are established everyone would start behaving themselves. Potter and Heath seem to think that this comparison alone swings it for Hobbes, yet both sets of ideas form part of that much bigger political/philosophical debate often referred to as the perfectibility of man. (One of the best summaries I have read was in Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue.)

Keen on the other hand positions himself as the kind of pessimistic commentator who instinctively regards all technological uptake as a Faustian bargain, and he clearly thinks we are all going to hell much sooner than we might have imagined. Some of us cookie-tagged sleaze-addicts may already be there. Second Life, he observes, is "a channel for all kinds of social and ethical vices" and anyone that spends any amount of time in there is likely to cease to be a functioning member of society.

Interestingly, he is a self-styled apostate, a Silicon Valley digital media entrepreneur that almost made it big with Web 1.0. Like his bête noir Kevin Kelly, Keen references The Total Library by Jorge Luis Borges. Both make use of the Library of Babel as a metaphor for the modern Web, yet I suspect Borges originally intended it to symbolise the cosmos; which surely makes Keen's commentary on it that much more apt:

"It is a place where there is no concrete reality, no right and wrong, no governing moral code. It is a place where truth is selective and constantly subject to change."

The Cult of the Amateur (1)

For a book that purports to warn us about the dangers of networked ignorance, Andrew Keen's polemic against Web 2.0 is itself quite badly mired in ignorant suppositions.

Its subtitle is How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. I'll come to Keen's cultural critique in a moment, but firstly let's quickly dispose of one of his economic arguments. He advises us that when Frit-o-Lay forked out just $50,000 to five competition finalists to make an amateur ad for their Super Bowl slot, rather than paying an agency the $381,000 that a professonally-made commercial would normally have cost, $331,000 was thus "sucked out of the economy". How so? Did a wormhole open up in the fabric of space-time? Did the Frit-O-Lay executives take the cash out and bury it under concrete in their company car park?

He is right that the 'culture industries' are experiencing a significant reconfiguration and perhaps also that techno-idealists have generally only considered the impact of all this from the point of view of the end-user. Yet he is still failing to convince me that the next generation of genuinely talented writers, artists and musicians is on course for creative liquidation.

I have about a third of the book still to read. Thus far I have found myself wanting to take issue with Keen at the end of almost every paragraph. He's not always talking nonsense, but the arguments are frustratingly loose and invariably powered by self-evident exaggerations. Many new technologies are indeed open to abuse, but Keen's rhetoric compells us to consider that in the case of Web 2.0 abuse is the norm (...that every Wikipedia editor is a lobotomised gimp etc.)

Yet how is it that we all found out about Edelman's manipulation of the blogosphere? Is the medium really as filter-free as Keen would have us believe?

I think of myself as a bit of a professional amateur and have sometimes considered with regret the passing of the great dilettantes from previous, less-specialised eras. It is of course so often the dabblers that will spot the connections between the various monolithic fields of study. Sometimes 2+2 really does = 5 and you need an ecclectic mind to point this out. (Let us not forget that Einstein came up with General Relativity whilst working at the Swiss Patent Office.)

Back in the heady days of Web 1.0 my agency consisted of half a dozen gifted amateurs. We had a go at everything, we made things up as we went along. Soon we were displaced by specialist coders, designers, marketeers etc. Did we starve? No, because the march of technology ensures that the horizon of wisdom-obsolescence is constantly shifting and the amateur can always survive by shuffling along after it.

"It's ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule...on steroids," squeals Keen of the socialised media. Of course this kind of anti-democratic rant is as old as political theory itself, and was probably best pitched by Plato in The Republic. Cultural elites are always going to lean towards the notion that society should be run by the experts and not by the idiots. A hundred years ago intellectuals like Keen were moaning about the very mass-market media whose demise is now said to represent the end of civilisation as we know it.

The downsides of democratisation have consistently revealed themselves the moment the masses turn up, and the altruistic anarchists have their party spoiled by a combination of the the banal and the malign. Yet by then the technofiles are usually already starting to move on somewhere else.

It is the job of the journalist to inform us not to converse with us, Keen himself informs us rather pompously. Real journalists take on the big institutions and run the risk of prosecution and jail. They have the training, the contacts, the influence... Without them, he suggests, the "pajama army" would have nothing to reference as all the former journalists and movie directors will be cleaning toilets, and the barren remnants of our culture will consist only of the facts that bloggers will have to make up to fill this appalling gap.

Yet today it was YouTube not the hallowed mainstream media that showed the French public how their newly-elected President rocked up late for a G8 press conference un peu éméché after what must have been some fairly liquid negotiations with Vladimir Putin.

Keen has systematically characterised the process in question as one of flattening and fragmentation when my own experience of it has also been of new dimensions and new connections. There must be a better response to the concept of the wisdom of the crowd than pointing out that the crowd has a track record of coming up with unwise ideas like slavery and Britney Spears.

And there's surely more to the recession of high culture and informed civic debate than the empowerment of the mediocre and the moronic by convergent technologies, but if this book has the answer then it's saving it for the last sixty pages.

More later perhaps, if I can tear myself away from that "corrupting and confusing...long commercial break dressed up as democratised media".

Attack of the wi-fi routers

Hilarious cartoon about the hidden killer lurking in our homes and schools!

This one looks especially evil.

Who's afraid of wi-fi?

Rob Lyons of Spiked has been getting on Panorama's case:

"Given the paucity of evidence about the negative health impacts of wi-fi, a more interesting documentary might have examined the reasons why some groups of people alight upon one aspect or another of modern life (wi-fi, power lines, pesticides, household chemicals - the list seems endless) to explain mysterious illness or as the focus of fears about the future. As Frank Furedi notes elsewhere on spiked, ‘perceptions of risk, ideas about safety and controversies over health, the environment and technology have little to do with science or empirical evidence. Rather, they are shaped by cultural assumptions about human vulnerability.’"

Meanwhile, anyone still keen to avoid those clouds of harmful radiation can sign-up for a new hot-spot detection service called We-Fi.

Cosmic smog

Attention all electro-sensitives! My suspicion that it is only a matter of time before we are told that the Big Bang - history's greatest wi-fi hot spot - can be seriously damaging to our health, has been bolstered today by following the heated exchanges heralding Panorama's investigation into the wi-fi 'smog' in our schools. Indeed a commenter on the Guardian Technology Blog has pointed out that the Cosmic Background Radiation from the Big Bang operates at the same 12cm wavelength as your average wi-fi router.

Update: The evidence that Panorama presents wantonly confuses the issue of the radiation emitted by mobile phones and that emitted by mobile phone masts. Indeed, the unusually high level of bollocks emitted by this documentary has in some ways spoiled my enjoyment of last week's exposé of Scientology.

"Some of these are run by a company called...the cloud". (You'd almost think it was all a bit tongue in cheek...but it isn't.)

Quoting Ian Betteridge (Technovia): "Professor Johansson doesn’t’ know the difference between high-frequency ionizing radiation - things like gamma rays emitted by a nuclear bomb - and non-ionizing radiation like radio waves..."

And Dr Michael Clark, of the Health Protection Agency: "When we have conducted measurements in schools, typical exposures from wi-fi are around 20 millionths of the international guideline levels of exposure to radiation. As a comparison, a child on a mobile phone receives up to 50 per cent of guideline levels. So a year sitting in a classroom near a wireless network is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes on a mobile. If wi-fi should be taken out of schools, then the mobile phone network should be shut down, too — and FM radio and TV, as the strength of their signals is similar to that from wi-fi in classrooms."

There's got to be a case for shutting Panorama down after this blatant piece of scare-mongering.

mSpace

I was struggling to appreciate the coolness of Southampton University's new experimental search engine until I realised that you could move the three category boxes at the top around, as well as adding extra ones from the list on the menu above. The developers call this interface trick sorting and slicing.

Amiblockedornot

Find out if your website is visible in China!
(Courtesy of the Pigeon Blog)

Usenet

Just used Google Groups to locate my debut posting on Usenet from March 16, 1995.

I asked how the Aztecs made their chocolate and pulque drinks and had a set of interesting replies.

E-books

Being a long-standing book lover with a collection that I like to stand and stare at proudly, I have mixed feelings about e-books and electronic ink.

Would I rather have all the books in my collection available on a device like SONY's Libri? No. But as well as having all the physical tomes on my bookshelf, I would appreciate having digital versions of the text that I could search etc. (The etc. part could be more than adequately covered by a tool like Frode's Hyperwords.)

I wonder whether we will one day get an access code with each book we buy allowing us to download a personal digital copy of the text?

Net-I

The Internet has been the source of a great deal of moral panic since I first started working in the field a decade ago. Up to now I've scoffed at each of the alarmist tocsins as they have sounded, but suddenly find an new one starting to ring in my ears.

Throughout most of Western history possibly the most significant divide in our culture (and especially our political culture) has been that typified by the ancient opposition of Athens and Sparta: the archetypal open and closed societies, the individualist plurality and the enforced collective.

The twentieth century in Europe saw one of the most overt confrontations between the two systems, but in much of history the duel between them has created schismatic antagonisms inside many of our core institutions, such as the Christian church. Studies of bacterial behaviour have shown that some degree of oscillation between the two extremes is fundamental to the way many organic systems respond to changing circumstances.

Now at the start of the twenty-first century the Internet is interfering with this age-old polarity in ways that are already destabilising to the societies we live in.

Many have compared the structure of Al Qaeda to the virtual corporation of the modern globalised economy, observing how well Islamic terror groups have adapted to the wired world. Fewer though have commented on how a networked culture helps to shape the mentality of Al Qaeda's alienated human bombs.

"In an institutional world that lays excessive emphasis on the personal, particular and concrete the abstract finds expression in occasional, extreme eruptions", wrote Andrew Calcutt last week in Spiked. He casts the cultural dispute underlying our current predicament as that between me-centered mainstream society and networked groups of willful outsiders, of a sort we have seen many times before, but given a new anti-Western, anti-imperialist twist by the teachings of radical Islam.

“Our so-called scholars of today are content with their Toyotas and semi- detached houses” mocked Mohammad Sidique Khan, the late ringleader of the July 7 attacks. Noting this mood of disenchantment with secular rewards Calcutt is prompted to suggest that "Islam exists in Britain today as a timely form of British popular culture. Indeed, I have observed young British people crossing over from Muslim culture to its Bling-Bling counterpart, and vice versa." He compares our home-grown suicide bombers with Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners - they are the absolutist beginners of July 7, comprehensively rejecting the personal in favour of an impersonal ideal, and in the process willingly "un-becoming the non-descript individual they might otherwise be."

Is this really just another, more deadly form of counter-culture?

On the ride home on Friday I chatted with Stefan about La Haine burning brightly every evening just across the channel. I related how when we drove down through France in September the sense of national exhaustion was almost palpable. Stefan confided his own suspicion that the UK is in many ways equally disfunctional, but we just don't know it yet.

Both nations have punched above their weight for a half century. Thanks in part to the "special relationship", Britain is still jabbing away, but France is clearly tiring and has been outscored in the last few rounds. No doubt you could write a monster essay explaining all the causes of this tip into decline, but as this particular post is about the Internet, so I will stick to that line of investigation.

In the case of Spain going online has re-opened the country up to the wider Spanish-speaking world. Unfortunately for the French it has simply revealed to them the sad truth that there isn't much of a global Francophone culture to belong to. For much of the nineties the French political elite banked pretty much everything on the EU, but the technocratic rump of this ideal no longer excites anyone. There's little else for them to do except protect the vieux fort of Frenchness from creeping multicultural mongrelisation - which has meant banishing the supermarkets, furniture stores, Buffalo Grills and African immigrants to the margins behind the ring roads.

Yet it's not just French politicians that have been left without a big project with share-eable values, the problem is clearly more widespread in the West. The response from politcians has generally been to jump on the bandwagon of me-centrism in the hope that home improvement and digital lifestyles might together refine into a new opium for the masses.

Meanwhile the Net continues to short-circuit many of our traditional modes of association. Most commercial enterprises have come to see this as an opportunity. But on a political and cultural level the effects are perhaps more worrying. It allows users to be virtual individuals within any number of different virtual collectives and the old rigid dichotomy of open-closed/individual-collective no longer reigns supreme over our political selfhood. (You might say that the dominant state of mind is neither Me nor Not-I, it's Net-I.)

The suicide terrorist is perhaps the ultimate prophet of this phenomenon, committed to an abstract self-negating collective ideal that rejects the evils of modern consumerism, yet at the same time aspiring to the VIP rewards of martyrdom.

Olivier Roy argued in Gloablised Islam that second or third generation Muslims in Europe tend have a more personal, alienated kind of faith owing to the absence of the social framework typical of a traditional Islamic society. Such a lack (or leakage) of the grounding of shared territorial citizenship is a feature of the netizen mentality that has helped to delegitimise traditional political elites and their agendas. Old-fashioned institutions (whether they are open or closed by inclination) may find it increasingly hard to get any traction with individuals whose minds have formed within the network, and the more disenfranchised in the real world they are, the more likely they are to blur into abstracted rebellion against it.

OBL's nihilistic footsoldiers may represent a long-term weakness for his Jihadist enterprise. After all alienated youth is not the best ingredient for an all-conquering horde or any other kind of mass movement - imagine an army of Pete Doherty's! Still, they have the power to be very destructive, especially whilst the self-consciously trashy world order they oppose remains so convinced that the problem can be fixed in the old-fashioned way.